Theaster Gates’s work bridges materiality and metaphor, engaging clay as both a literal substance and a vessel for cultural memory. With Voulkos Ghost (2021), Gates pays homage to Peter Voulkos, a groundbreaking figure in postwar American ceramics who initially learned his craft from Frances Senska at Montana State University. The bisque-fired form, monumental in scale, merges reverence with reinvention, echoing Gates’s interest in how objects carry the weight of lineage and identity.

A Clay Sermon (2021) is a film that Gates made while in residence at The Archie Bray Center for the Ceramic Arts in Helena Montana that weaves together footage of Gates throwing pots, archival material and improvisational gospel performed by the Black Monks, a musical ensemble formed by Gates. The film is a meditation on clay as a medium of transformation, both spiritual and social. Through these works, Gates offers a multifaceted reflection on clay as origin, ritual, and resistance.

For its 2025 exhibition season, Tinworks Art presents A Kin to Clay, an exhibition that honors the rich legacy of ceramics in Montana while tracing its connections to broader histories and cultural lineages. Through the work of artists who engage clay and earthen materials as vessels of memory, resistance, and community, the exhibition explores how a shared relationship to the earth can shape meaning across generations and geographies.

A leading figure in contemporary art and social practice, Theaster Gates has redefined the possibilities of what art can do - transforming abandoned spaces, reimagining cultural memory, and shaping public life through a practice that fuses sculpture, urbanism, performance, and preservation. Trained in urban planning, ceramics, and religious studies, Gates engages architecture, archives, craft traditions, and Black cultural histories to create works that are both deeply material and powerfully conceptual. His wide-ranging practice draws on civic engagement and institutional critique as much as formal sculpture, painting, and performance. Known for revitalizing vacant buildings on Chicago’s South Side into vibrant spaces for art and community, Gates confronts systems of value—economic, spiritual, and artistic—through what he calls “the life within things.”

Gates’s work has been the subject of major exhibitions at institutions around the world, and his influence extends into academia, philanthropy, and policy. He is the founder of the Rebuild Foundation, a professor at the University of Chicago, and the recipient of numerous international awards, including the Nasher Prize for Sculpture and the Légion d’Honneur. Born in Chicago in 1973, Gates continues to live and work in the city.